Right Reason

Of Progress and Kleptocracy

 

As society progresses, there is the need for land and stocks of capital to produce make possible the opulence of life which defines the bourgeois world. Within a hunting-gathering band, people can get by just with what they are able to secure for themselves with labor alone. Tools like axes and bows in wide use, but fitting the nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, these tools are personal items which can be kept on the person of their owners, and there is very little accumulation of tools actually going on.

With accumulation and the ownership of land comes the opportunity for kleptocracy in those societies. The necessity of there being lands and stocks of capital goods for which people are the residual claimants of opens human society to the exploitation of those claims for ill. Such manipulation can come in the form of the idle landowners being able to secure power for themselves within Parliament through the manipulation of rotten boroughs or the mafia extorting protection money from trifling shop owners. Both result in people who are contributing little to others being able to secure power and resources for their own benefit, and both would be impossible in a hunting-gathering society. The progress of society from the conditions of the hunting-gathering band therefore create the conditions in which corruption and kleptocracy can flourish largely because of the existence of settled lands, and valuable stocks of capital goods.

 

However, we should not proceed from that conclusion to a longing for the egalitarian hunting-gathering band. Kleptocratic elements are inevitable in any human society with any material advancement. As such, they should often be accepted simply as part of the  costs of opulence and prosperity rather than as a plague which must be exterminated at any costs. Sometimes it is even refreshing when corruption is clearly corruption rather than as passed for something more pure. Take the Federal government, so many of its employees go on to work for private companies that are able to use the tacit knowledge those new employees have of the Federal government for their own profit. It’s corruption on a massive scale, and it is even more blameworthy because those responsible simply won’t be honest about what they’re doing, but continue to masquerade as benevolent officials. 

Of Accumulation and Progress

 

What we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world.

 -Søren Kierkegaard  

 

For the 1965-65 World Exhibit, Walt Disney designed a show for General Electric’s exhibit there which would showcase the material progress of the western world over the past six decades, and especially the great leap in living standards which widespread use of electricity has made possible. The show, named “The Carousel of Progress,” follows the course of progress across four different periods: at the beginning of the 19^th century, another just around 1904, another during the 1920s,  another during the 1940s, and another supposed to be set in the audience’s own future. What the carousel makes clear is that the median of society has been made much better off than they once were by the increased production possibilities of modern capitalism, and that progress is to be found in this accumulation of material over the course of time. 

 

Also important here is that even if we are to take a optimistic view of the welfare state’s influence on the general welfare, then we must accept that government is a normal good. A “normal good” being a way economists talk about the relationship between an agent’s income and his demand for a certain type of good. Normality implies that the demand for a good increases, and it has been true in history that as people become wealthier, as they have more resources to spend on other things in their lives, that their desire for government services increases. For instance, it is useless to complain about the lack of safety regulations during the 19^th century because industrial societies then did not have the wealth of the later societies which actually instituted the welfare state. Even the acclaimed progress of the welfare state can therefore be seen as a product of the greater progress of capitalism, and humanity’s capability for material production. 

 

However praiseworthy the progress of the past three hundred years may be, though, it is necessary to remember that progress can only make the improvement of the human condition easier. It cannot improve it by itself. The simple accumulation of goods can do nothing to make human beings themselves virtuous. If we orientate ourselves simply towards accumulation, then we neglect what the most beneficial effect of progress: The ability for people to spend more of their attention towards what really matters. Even Adam Smith noted that ambition is often met with merely the accumulation of trinkets, which can do little to genuinely improve their lives. Despite the fact that one of Adam Smith’s key projects in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is to dignify the trifling pursuits of merchants, and the virtue of people minding their own business, he still notes that our desire for material progress in our own lives can lead to nothing but the accumulation of toys that can do little to truly make ourselves better.